YouTube Gets More Social With Facebook

Hot on the heels of its look back at the most popular videos of the year, YouTube today showed its continued dominance as a video-sharing service by announcing tighter integration with Facebook.

YouTube, a Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) subsidiary, said in a blog post it’s experimenting with a new “feed” feature connecting YouTube and Facebook. The feed pushes the YouTube videos your friends are embedding on their Facebook back to your YouTube homepage.

YouTube is currently testing out this new video syndication feature and provides details on how users can try for themselves in the blog post. Users need to stay connected on Facebook for the syndication to work.

“We see the YouTube homepage as only the start of your video journey. It’s where you should be able to get a snapshot of the ‘YouTube Zeitgeist’ at any moment — that is, those videos that are most relevant to you and to the times,” Chris Testa, a software engineer at YouTube, said in the blog post.

“Sometimes those videos are served up by algorithms that offer recommendations based on your viewing history or the channels you’re subscribed to. By adding the videos your friends are embedding on Facebook into the mix, we’re hoping to close a loop with regards to how videos are shared and consumed these days,” he added.

And Facebook users are embedding a lot of videos on their personal pages. It is the biggest site among social networks. YouTube said a staggering 46.2 year’s worth of YouTube videos are viewed on Facebook everyday. The numbers for other social networking sites Orkut, MySpace and Hi5 trail off are lower but still significant at 12.7, 5.6 and 1.2 year’s worth watched per day, respectively.

Greatest hits of 2009

Surprise singing sensation Susan Boyle easily topped the list of the most watched YouTube videos for the year with her appearance on “Britain’s Got Talent.” The video garnered over 120 million views for the year.

The rest of the top five were:

David After Dentist in at number two with 37+ million views; JK Wedding Entrance Dance at third with 33+ million views; the New Moon Movie Trailer fourth with 31+ million views and Evian Roller Babies coming in fifth at 27+ million views.

In compiling the list, Google said that in some instances it aggregated views across multiple versions of the same video.

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